Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed -the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.- First published in 1946; now in a new translation by Matthew Ward.

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"The Stranger is a strikingly modern text and Matthew Ward's translation will enable readers to appreciate why Camus's stoical anti-hero and -devious narrator remains one of the key expressions of a postwar Western malaise, and one of the cleverest exponents of a literature of ambiguity." -from the Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie

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Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd." First published in 1946; now in a new translation by Matthew Ward.

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5.0 out of 5 stars"Maman died today"

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Monsieur Meursault is a French-Algerian: his mother (Maman) has just died and he attends her funeral. That event is the axis about which the story turns - not so much the physical attendance or even the external events of the funeral, but rather Meursault's psychological reaction to her death. The reader is left to deduce their own 'connections' between the death of Maman and the events that follow - which will ultimately lead Meursault to the guillotine.

The story is full of metaphor and discovery: the sun and light and heat bristle throughout the pages of the story. "She said, 'If you go slowly, you risk getting a sunstroke. But if you go too fast, you work up a sweat and then catch a chill inside the church.' She was right. There was no way out"

The book is short (125 pages) and written in the short sentence, staccato style of writers like Hemingway. The read is easy but the meanings are deeper than the words on the page. By the end the effect is a story told in the detail of two or three times the pages that Albert Camus uses. It is clever and thought provoking and well worth the read!

The first novel I’ve read in ages, I was exposed to Camus by a Goodreads reviewer. Much later a bracing audio series by The Great Courses and Robert Solomon arrested my interest. Without both, I’d not have liked the book as much.

Camus writes a metaphor. With exception of the value nature has for the main character, Meursault—colors in the sky, smell of the countryside, sea spray in the air—the metaphor is for meaning in life through emphasis of its absence. “Marie came by to see me,” says Meursault, “and asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said it didn’t make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted. Then she wanted to know if I loved her. I answered the same way…that it didn’t mean anything but that I probably didn’t love her…[but] if she wanted to we could get married.”

Then there was the obliviousness of Meursault. While listening to a lawyer prosecute him for murder, Meursault thinks to himself, “Of course, I couldn’t help admitting that he was right. I didn’t feel much remorse for what I’d done. But I was surprised by how relentless he was. I would have liked to have tried explaining to him cordially, almost affectionately, that I had never been able to truly feel remorse for anything. My mind was always on what was coming next, today or tomorrow.”

But the trial isn’t really about the murder, so much as it is about Meursault, and how dangerous is his potential to show people they invent meaning, and that they can just as easily uninvent it. As the lawyer says of Meursault’s empty heart, it is “an abyss threatening to swallow society.”

Finally in prison, awaiting “my head cut off in the public square in the name of the French people,” Meursault begins to realize what gives life value is its brevity. He never thought much about death, other than when his father returned home from an execution (funeral?) to vomit from the experience. “I blame myself every time for not having paid enough attention to accounts of execution. A man should always take an interest in those things. You never know what might happen…How had I not seen that there was nothing more important than an execution, and that when you come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could be truly interested in?”

According to the audio series, Camus meant to create a mirror for the reader to see themselves. It worked.

When asked to list my top five novels, I included The Plague. I had held that opinion about the book since I read it nearly forty years ago. But would that still hold true if I read the book today? The person who had asked me to select my top five novels had found out that he no longer felt the same way about many of his favorite novels he had read as a young adult.

Finished The Plague yesterday evening. It had as powerful an effect on me today as when I first read it. Perhaps more so. Now it resonates with me, echoing off decades of experience. It is a parable of human life, that is, the sensation of moving -- sometimes forward, sometimes back, oft times in place, treading water -- somewhere between the poles of plague and peace, destined to fail at being alive, yet finding sustenance in irrational hope, human love, a stubborn refusal to quit, and the knowledge that we share this struggle with others. It remains on my top five books.

The Stranger's power is in its brevity. Though the novel can be finished in an afternoon, The Stranger is a powerful analysis about the arbitrariness of justice and an exploration of the existential stages of life in which one is expected to proceed through to become a genuine human being. Meursault's initial existence, confined only to his sensory experiences, is woefully inadequate to qualify him as leading the full life that most individuals desire. Meursault's subsequent 'legal troubles' lead him to a far greater understanding of the life to which he is happily a complete and utter subject to. The novel also touches on ideas about determinism and nihilism and critiques the social structure of relationships and the 'justice system'. Justice, freedom, and of course religious ideas are lambasted by Camus in the text.